The creation of more and more video games increases the need to understand the gameplay and enjoy the gaming experience. This compels gaming companies to partner with gaming translation services and translate their games for the global gaming audiences out there. You might think that gaming translation is a new phenomenon.
However, translation has been present since 2500 BC. And translation in the gaming industry came as soon as games gained the hype in the 1970s. The whole purpose of gaming translation is to transform games from a foreign experience to a native and local one.
In this read, we are going to explore the history of game translation and how it became a permanent part of the gaming industry.
Game Translation
First of all, let’s talk about gaming translation. Game translation doesn’t just mean translating gaming text for diverse audiences. Rather, it means making sure that every part of the game is understandable for the audience such as menu buttons, maps, descriptions, etc. All of these efforts are done to make a game adaptable for a specific market.
Game translation is not an easy task. It is about taking a game and transforming it for a certain audience. When this task of translation is done right, it makes a game such a local experience that players don’t even recognize that their game is originally in a foreign language.
Partnering with a game localization company makes your product (game) an adaptable experience for the audience. The influx of game translation is so huge that now when a game is launched, its translated versions come out really soon. But before this greater demand, it took months and even years for a game to be translated and gamers had to wait a long time.
Advent of Game Translation
As mentioned earlier, game translation started in the 1970s when games started to appeal to the audiences and their demand rose. The history of game translation is deeply involved with the evolution of the gaming industry itself. So you can’t just talk about game translation without discussing the growth and development of the game industry. At the start of games, there was mainly adventure-based textual information that was typically easy to translate.
The talk about gaming translation started in the 1970s however, the first game to come on board as a translated game was Pac-Man in the 1980s. The game was localized for the US market. In the start, gaming translation was based “literally done by a programmer with a phrase book”. It means that there was a set up and games were translated through that set up which means that game translation mainly consisted of literal translation.
Japanese Games
You might question why games were even translated and localized. Well, the answer to this question is that initially games were created by Japanese developers so they were solely serving the Japanese audiences. Pac-Man was called “Puck Man” in Japan. It was localized for the US market and that’s how it got the name Pac-Man because Puck could sound offensive in the United States. Even though the character names were changed so that English audiences could see the game as a local one, “Reddie” became”Blinky” in the American marketplace.
So as Japanese names were the ones that dominated the gaming market for many years, Japanese developers needed translation solutions for their games. And that’s how the world got to know about gaming translation. And then came the rise of Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs), such as Dungeon Explorer, Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star II, and Dragon Quest which shook the whole world. English gamers became more than ever interested in Japanese games and that gave rise to translation.
Era of Mistakes and Blunders
We all know that gaming translation is not at all easy, so yes there were many mistakes in the industry in the start. For instance, the 1989 Japanese video game, Zero Wing, became famous not only for its gameplay (side-scrolling shooter arcade video game) but also for its translation mistakes. Instead of translating to “CATS has taken all of your bases”, the translation blunder was, “CATS: All your base are belong to us”.
Current State of the Game Translation Industry
Currently, game translation is on the rise. The revenue this industry generates is greater than the combined revenue of the movie and music industry. So you can understand how famous this industry is. Not only are Japanese games in high demand but American and Chinese AAA games have also taken the lead.
By the end of 2025, this industry’s worth is going to be much more than $268 billion. AI technologies like Machine Translation (MT), Neural Machine Translation (NMT), and Machine Translation Post Editing (MTPE) are actively being used. Hence, an amalgam of human translators and AI technologies brings forward such results that allow gaming companies to generate huge amounts of revenue and give tough competition to their rivals.
Final Words!
To sum up, gaming translation started a very long time ago when Japanese developers translated their games for the US market and then a series of translations began. There have been mistakes in game translation but they have allowed us to learn from them and improve and now the gaming industry is heavily on the rise, all thanks to native human translators and AI solutions.
